Despite having supported hundreds of organisations and tens of thousands of people to create a Manual of Me over the last few years, I think the majority of people are using them incorrectly - here's why.
It's not just a document for others
If you've never seen or created a personal user manual before - they're effectively a short document with a number of powerful questions and answers, describing how you work, your preferences, your motivations, your blockers, and insights into who you are and how you work best with others. You can see an example here.
Despite a personal user manual being a document, the power of the Manual of Me framework does not lie in the document itself. In fact, handing out your Manual of Me for others to read is often something thing we encourage people to avoid.
Imagine your first day in a new job, and being given 25 pieces of paper and being expected to read a long list of people's behaviours, preferences and expectations about working together. This approach dehumanises work even further than it has been over the past few years - and removes the most powerful aspect of Manual of Me: conversations.
What Manual of Me creates is not the document itself, but rather a process of setting an intention, time and space for individuals or teams to explore and reflect upon how they work; it's a framework to choose the questions we want to both ask each other, and that allow us to share things about ourselves; it's a process to uncover insights about the differences and similarities in our teams, and once we've surfaced those - ask: what do we do with this new information about each other?
It's a tool for self-reflection, not direction
After creating a Manual of Me, the insights uncovered are just as much for the individual to reflect upon, and use the contents of their Manual in every day situations, to be more aware of their own behaviours and preferences, so when they start collaborating with others, they can hold a better understanding about their own needs - and be more aware if they come up against something which might misalign or clash with those preferences. Knowing that your most focused hours in the day (for example) are between 8am-11am, and then being asked to join a daily stand-up at 9am, will help you immediately recognise that your focus time will be disrupted - and gives you a better understanding of perhaps why you feel frustrated each morning - less because of the stand-up, but more because you're lacking the opportunity for flow.
Likewise, if you've discovered that you need to understand the context and purpose behind a task, in order to do it well, but you're consistently just being told to do something without that background information - might encourage you to ask questions at the project kickoff, so you're able to feel more informed, rather than pushing through and trying to get the work done, whilst being frustrated with a sense of not knowing how it fits in to the bigger picture.
Handing your personal user manual out to someone and expecting them to read and remember everyone's preferences is unrealistic at best, and arrogant at worst. But using the insights you've uncovered about yourself in the process of creating your Manual of Me, and then taking responsibility for addressing any of your preferences or needs which aren't being met - allows you to navigate your work and collaborations with greater ease.
Use it to spark better conversations and collaborations
There's an argument to say that a Manual of Me doesn't ever need to be shared, but rather, you use it as a deeply personal document which allows you to reflect and build upon your own ways of working, and be better informed when you're collaborating with others, to surface the things which are most important to you, through conversation, through a project kickoff, or whatever means is most appropriate for the context.
However, there's still a great deal of power and benefit from sharing and discussing your Manual of Me with others. But again, not in a way which removes the conversation. Emailing someone your Manual of Me and expecting them to digest it before you work together is unlikely to work - but asking your colleague to think about the answer to a couple of key questions, or both of you bringing your own Manuals to a kickoff session, sharing some critical points that are useful to share with each other, and crucially, discussing how you'll both navigate any of the points which feel like they could lead to challenges or issues - that's where the power lies. If you spot, for example, that your working hours are not overlapping frequently enough - this is going to be something you'll want to design around. If, for example, you like seeing the big picture, and your collaborator needs to see detail and focuses on the process - again, you'll want to find a common way of communicating and agreeing upon things.
So, if you're using a personal user manual as a pre-read for working with you - beware of how little impact that might have, or even worse, how it might come across if you're telling someone to read a list of instructions on how to work with you, before you've even met. Consider instead using your Manual of Me as a catalyst to better conversations, a toolkit for understanding yourself better, and a way to design better collaboration. It's an input to better work, rather than an output to email around.
If you're interested in learning more about how Manual of Me could be leveraged within your team or organisation, beyond the powerful but simple creation of a personal user manual - get in touch. We've got lots of ways we can help you implement, adopt and and make use of Manual of Me - including workshops, training, coaching, consulting and co-design.
